Trump Team Prepares $1 Trillion Infrastructure Plan to Spur Economy
June 16th, 2020
Via: Reuters:
The Trump administration is preparing an up to $1 trillion infrastructure package focused on transportation projects as part of its push to spur the world’s largest economy back to life, a source familiar with the situation said on Tuesday.
The Department of Transportation’s preliminary version reserves most funds for projects such as roads and bridges, but will also set aside about a quarter of the money for priorities such as 5G wireless infrastructure and rural broadband, two sources said.
India Says 20 Soldiers Killed in Clash with Chinese Troops
June 16th, 2020Via: AP:
A border clash high in the Himalayas between the world’s two most populated countries has claimed the lives of 20 Indian soldiers in the first deadly violence since the two nuclear armed neighbors faced off in a border dispute 45 year ago.
The Indian and Chinese troops fought each other with fists and rocks along the high-altitude Himalaya terrain in a clash that left 20 Indian soldiers dead, Indian authorities said Tuesday.
China accused Indian forces of carrying out “provocative attacks” on its troops and has not said if any of its soldiers have died.
The Indian army said in its statement that the two sides had “disengaged” from the disputed Galwan area where they clashed overnight on Monday.
Political Groups Use “Deeply Spooky” Protester Location Data
June 16th, 2020Via: Ars Technica:
It’s no secret that police and other law enforcement agencies have a history of using mobile phone location and other data to target or investigate individuals, and the wave of mass protests in support of black communities and against police brutality this month has provided a rich data trove for them to probe. As it turns out, cops aren’t the only ones diving into the data to follow demonstrators after the streets are clear.
Political advocacy and voter-registration groups are reaping the bounty of location data tied to protests, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The groups use geofencing to contact those who were at protests—basically, reaching out to every device that was in a certain area at a certain time, without specifically identifying the individual. In this case, activists reach out with political messages.
Quentin James, founder and president of The Collective, a political action group that supports black candidates for political office, told the Journal he has been using location-based outreach to promote voter registration. “When these protests emerged, it was eye-opening for folks to understand, wow, people are gathering again,” James told the WSJ. “We want to make sure we’re using all available tools in our toolbox to make sure we’re reaching the right people.”
As Many as Six Billion Earth-Like Planets in Our Galaxy
June 16th, 2020Via: PhysOrg:
“My calculations place an upper limit of 0.18 Earth-like planets per G-type star,” says UBC researcher Michelle Kunimoto, co-author of the new study in The Astronomical Journal. “Estimating how common different kinds of planets are around different stars can provide important constraints on planet formation and evolution theories, and help optimize future missions dedicated to finding exoplanets.”
Scientists Edited Human Embryos in the Lab, and It Was a Disaster
June 16th, 2020Via: OneZero:
A team of scientists has used the gene-editing technique CRISPR to create genetically modified human embryos in a London lab, and the results of the experiment do not bode well for the prospect of gene-edited babies.
Biologist Kathy Niakan and her team at the Francis Crick Institute wanted to better understand the role of a particular gene in the earliest stages of human development. So, using CRISPR, they deleted that gene in human embryos that had been donated for research. When they analyzed the edited embryos and compared them to ones that hadn’t been edited, they found something troubling: Around half of the edited embryos contained major unintended edits.
“There’s no sugarcoating this,” says Fyodor Urnov, a gene-editing expert and professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. “This is a restraining order for all genome editors to stay the living daylights away from embryo editing.”
Starlink Will Cause Large Change in Seismic Oil and Gas Exploration
June 15th, 2020Oil companies use tape to store information collected from reflection seismology. A lot of tape. A lot of bulky, slow, expensive tape.
Starlink will allow for the fast movement of terabytes of data from remote exploration vessels to cloud storage for analysis. Currently, the data moves by crates in helicopters and trucks.
Via: BigMarker:
For decades, seismic exploration has operated with little to no access to the internet in the field. A network of low-Earth orbiting (LEO) satellites are to become one of the game-changing events of the 21st century. Starlink is offering, the world’s most advanced highspeed broadband internet; performance designed to surpass traditional satellite internet. A revolutionary project of this scale presents great opportunities; what will this mean for seismic exploration projects to have instant access to real-time data from remote fields? Will it become a paramount shift? How will it transform seismic exploration and what will this game-changing event mean for the oil and gas industry?
Join Guy C. Holmes, CEO of Tape Ark as he discusses how low-earth orbiting satellites will open up seismic exploration, and how it will become a breakthrough event that shifts the industry.
Melinda Gates: After Health Care Workers, Vaccinate Black People Next
June 15th, 2020Well, at least they’re consistent: The Bill Gates Effect: WHO’s DTP Vaccine Killed More Children in Africa Than the Diseases it Targeted
Via: Time:
Who needs it after health care workers?
In the U.S., that would be black people next, quite honestly, and many other people of color. They are having disproportionate effects from COVID-19.
Canadian Scientist Sent Deadly Viruses to Wuhan Lab Months Before RCMP Asked to Investigate
June 15th, 2020“The virus shipments are not related to the outbreak of COVID-19 or research into the pandemic, Canadian officials said.”
Mmm hmm.
What is admitted in this article (in terms of what was sent to China) is almost unbelievable.
Also, the denials about “conspiracy theories” are hilarious. I mean, Bill Gates, millions of dollars in research grants to the recently deceased former director, who happened to be the director when the lab took delivery of coronavirus samples, and now, whatever the Chinese wanted, they got.
Somehow, when mentioning dangerous gain of function research, that’s not done in the U.S. or Canada anymore, the article doesn’t mention Fauci: Dr. Fauci Backed Controversial Wuhan Lab with Millions of U.S. Dollars for Risky Coronavirus “Gain of Function” Research
It’s all just a big, unfortunate, regrettable cauldron of coincidences. Clearly the “conspiracy theories” are insane.
Via: CBC:
Newly-released access-to-information documents reveal details about a shipment of deadly pathogens last year from Canada’s National Microbiology Lab to China — confirming for the first time who sent them, what exactly was shipped, and where it went.
CBC News had already reported about the shipment of Ebola and Henipah viruses but there’s now confirmation one of the scientists escorted from the lab in Winnipeg amid an RCMP investigation last July was responsible for exporting the pathogens to the Wuhan Institute of Virology four months earlier.
Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, her husband Keding Cheng and her students from China were removed from Canada’s only level-4 lab over what’s described as a possible “policy breach.” The Public Health Agency of Canada had asked the RCMP to get involved several months earlier.
The virus shipments are not related to the outbreak of COVID-19 or research into the pandemic, Canadian officials said.
…
“It is suspicious. It is alarming. It is potentially life-threatening,” said Amir Attaran, a law professor and epidemiologist at the University of Ottawa.
“We have a researcher who was removed by the RCMP from the highest security laboratory that Canada has for reasons that government is unwilling to disclose. The intelligence remains secret. But what we know is that before she was removed, she sent one of the deadliest viruses on Earth, and multiple varieties of it to maximize the genetic diversity and maximize what experimenters in China could do with it, to a laboratory in China that does dangerous gain of function experiments. And that has links to the Chinese military.”
Gain of function experiments are when a natural pathogen is taken into the lab, made to mutate, and then assessed to see if it has become more deadly or infectious.
Most countries, including Canada, don’t do these kinds of experiments — because they’re considered too dangerous, Attaran said.
“The Wuhan lab does them and we have now supplied them with Ebola and Nipah viruses. It does not take a genius to understand that this is an unwise decision,” he said.
“I am extremely unhappy to see that the Canadian government shared that genetic material.”
FCC Has “Serious Doubts” that SpaceX Can Deliver Latencies Under 100ms
June 14th, 2020In the darkest days of my Internet connectivity hell in rural NZ, I had to use IPstar, which had latencies as high as 1000ms+. Yep. Not a typo. Over a second.
How is SpaceX going to improve on that by a couple orders of magnitude? Operating the Starlink constellation in low earth orbit is part of the plan. Additionally, initial rumors indicated that Starlink would use optical backhaul, which, in the vacuum of space, would be extremely fast, perhaps 50% faster than fiber.
But optical backhaul isn’t happening. At least not yet.
As this must read piece in LaserFocusWorld states, “Many challenges remain to be overcome in linking small satellites via laser, but progress is being made.”
Once again, can SpaceX achieve low latencies without optical backhaul?
Professor Mark Handly considers the possibility that SpaceX could achieve low latency using ground stations.
A couple of hours ago, Musk continued to stand behind the 20ms claim and taunts us with 8ms in the future:
Around 20ms. It’s designed to run real-time, competitive video games. Version 2, which is at lower altitude could be as low as 8ms latency.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 15, 2020
If you live in New Zealand: Please sign up to be notified about Starlink developments and include your country and postal code. Rural Internet services in NZ continue to have us over a barrel. It would be nice if there was competition from the SkyMusk system.
Via: Ars Technica:
Service providers that intend to use low-Earth orbit satellites claim that the latency of their technology is “dictated by the laws of physics” due to the altitude of the satellite’s orbit. We remain skeptical that the altitude of a satellite’s orbit is the sole determinant of a satellite applicant’s ability to meet the Commission’s low-latency performance requirements. As commenters have explained, the latency experienced by customers of a specific technology is not merely a matter of the physics of one link in the transmission. Propagation delay in a satellite network does not alone account for latency in other parts of the network such as processing, routing, and transporting traffic to its destination. Short-form applicants seeking to bid as a low-latency provider using low-Earth orbit satellite networks will face a substantial challenge demonstrating to Commission staff that their networks can deliver real-world performance to consumers below the Commission’s 100ms low-latency threshold.
…
SpaceX has argued that the FCC’s skepticism is unwarranted, telling agency officials that its Starlink broadband system “easily clears the commission’s 100ms threshold for low-latency services, even including its ‘processing time’ during unrealistic worst-case scenarios.” While altitude isn’t the only factor in latency, SpaceX’s altitudes, ranging from 540km to 570km, are a fraction of the 35,000km used with geostationary satellites. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said the company is aiming for latency below 20ms, similar to cable Internet and low enough to support competitive online gaming. SpaceX will have a chance to make its case in detail to the FCC during the application stage.
Pentagon Surplus Handouts Stoke the Militarization of U.S. Police
June 14th, 2020This has been happening since 1997.
Via: AFP:
When US police flooded the streets around the country to confront protesters two weeks ago, for many it appeared like the army had deployed, with camouflage uniforms and combat gear, heavily armored anti-mine vehicles, and high-powered assault weapons.
That’s not by accident. For years the US Defense Department has been handing its surplus equipment over for free to police departments — and the departments, large and small, have revelled in it.
Critics say it has been part of the overall militarization of the police, and helped fuel mass nationwide demonstrations against police abuse and deadly tactics that began after the May 25 killing of a handcuffed African American, George Floyd, by a Minneapolis police officer.
As soon as protests began in Minneapolis, the city’s troubled police department rolled out armored vehicles appearing more suited to Middle East battlefields.
Other large cities have them too, but also small towns.
…
Since 1997, the US military has distributed used and new equipment ranging from handguns to helicopters to armored vehicles, worth around $8.6 billion, to more than 8,000 federal, tribal and local police forces, according to the US Congress.
In 2015 President Barack Obama severely limited the program, but his successor Donald Trump restored it in 2017.
That year alone, some 500 million pieces of military equipment were transferred to the country’s police services under the 1033 program.
